not be used for the purposes of this project. The SSA response
rate is the number of records received divided by the total
number of queries. There are two reasons why the response
rate is inappropriate for a patient match rate at Children’s
Health. SSA assumes the queried electronic health record
(EHR) has the common patient, and all queried patients have
consented to participate in an electronic exchange. HIM performed data cleansing on SSA baseline and result data. The
SSA data only included queries of confirmed common patients. Children’s Health did this by manually reviewing its
master patient index (MPI) for queries that did not produce
a weight for a common patient. Unconfirmed patients in the
MPI were excluded. Consent participation status was not a
factor in any of the queries.

Data for Patient Matching

SSA standard data fields used in queries for matching included: full name, date of birth (DOB), sex, address, and
SSN. Children’s Health performed a review of its patient
data elements and found that all elements used by SSA were
available to them. The project focused on the impact of
additional elements such as phone number and email addresses that were captured by Children’s Health with availability for matching but not utilized by SSA. An analysis revealed that if SSA provided the patient’s phone number and
email address, then the scores would surpass minimum
requirements allowing a match. Since phone numbers and
email addresses are collected during the registration process and are easily available, Children’s Health HIM leaders
met with SSA to discuss including this information in their
query for records.

HIM performed quantitative data analysis that focused
on unsuccessful SSA matches returning a suggested patient but not scoring the minimum threshold weight. Queries that failed minimum match score (within one to two
points of matching) were included in the analysis. Figure
2 on page 40 shows how the SSA root cause analysis of this
cohort shed light on data issues and why the cohort did not
meet the minimum threshold weight. Some of the reasons
include:

1. No matching address. Address is a key data element used
in matching. The analysis showed a lack of matching on
addresses in this subset cohort.

Complete different address. Patient had not updated
current address with Children’s Health.

2. Name difference. Hyphenated last names or the last
name variations of a hyphenated last name resulted in a
lower score for a like name. For example:

Jose Gomez

Jose GomezSmith
Jose Ramirez

Jose Ramirez-Smith

3. Lack of a SSN. The SSA sends the full SSN in its queries,
but many patients do not give their SSN to healthcare providers. Pediatric patients may not have a SSN on admission or their parents may not have the child’s SSN readily
available during the registration process. The opportunity
to match patients who did not have an SSN collected was
difficult.